During the latter years of Clinton’s tenure, however, the project came to be viewed as a white elephant likely to fail. The Caspian countries were governed by corrupt, unstable regimes that remained under Moscow’s sway despite their nominal independence. The pipeline would be extremely costly and vulnerable to sabotage. To top it off, early Western explorations in the Caspian turned up estimates of the sea’s potential resources far more modest than previous projections.
8
While the United States remained committed to tapping the Caspian, the program moved forward at a slow pace. That changed when Bush took office and oil executives were welcomed into the White House like cousins at a family reunion. By September 2002, construction on the massive eleven-hundred-mile Caspian pipeline was under way. The BBC described it as a project that U.S. officials favored because it would “weaken Russia’s stranglehold on regional pipeline network and leave Iran on the sidelines.”
9
A potential problem for the project lay in what the White House saw as the dangerous geography of the neighborhood—located not far from Chechnya and Iran. The Bush administration, therefore, made a number of moves that would result in at least one regime change in the region and the deployment of forces from Blackwater and other U.S. war-servicing firms to protect what would be one of Washington’s most ambitious power grabs on former Soviet territory.
In 2003, the Bush administration helped overthrow the government of a longtime U.S. ally, President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia. Once considered Washington’s closest strategic partner in the region and affectionately referred to as “Shevy-Chevy” by U.S. officials like James Baker, Shevardnadze had fallen fast out of favor with the administration of George W. Bush, as Shevardnadze began increasingly doing business with Moscow after years of U.S. patronage.
10
Among his sins: granting new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms and obstructing Washington’s grand Caspian pipeline plan. Soon after those transgressions, he was forced to resign in November 2003 as the so-called Rose Revolution brought to power a more staunchly pro-U.S. regime. The first telephone call the new acting president, Nino Burdzhanadze, made when she took over from Shevardnadze was to oil giant BP to “assure them the pipeline would be OK.”
11
Just prior to taking power in Georgia, the new U.S.-backed leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, announced, “All strategic contracts in Georgia, especially the contract for the Caspian pipeline, are a matter of survival for the Georgian state.”
12
That regime change resulted in the closure of Russian bases in Georgia and an increase in U.S. military aid to the country. In early 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld deployed private military contractors from the Washington firm Cubic on a three-year $15 million contract to Georgia “to equip and advise the former Soviet republic’s crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged Moscow,” reported London’s
Guardian.
“A Georgian security official said the Cubic team would also improve protection of the pipeline that will take Caspian oil from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. Georgia has already expressed its gratitude by agreeing to send 500 troops to Iraq.”
13
The Bush administration knew that the controversial pipeline would need to be protected in each country it passed through. While Washington increased its military aid to Georgia, it faced a decade-long U.S. Congressional ban on military assistance to Azerbaijan, where the oil would be extracted. In 1992, Congress banned such aid because of Azerbaijan’s bloody ethnic and territorial conflict with Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabak region. But on January 25, 2002, President Bush “waived” that section of the Congressional Act, thereby allowing U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan to resume. The White House said the waiver was “necessary to support United States efforts to counter international terrorism [and] to support the operational readiness of United States Armed Forces or coalition partners to counter international terrorism”
14
—in other words, to protect oil interests. In the fall of 2003, the administration officially launched a project it called “Caspian Guard,” under which the United States would significantly bolster the military capabilities of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
15
Similar to the U.S. plan in Georgia, the $135 million program would create a network of commando and special operations forces that would protect the lucrative oil and gas exploitation being plotted out by transnational oil corporations and patrol the massive pipeline project that would allow an easy flow of the hydrocarbon resources of the Caspian to Western markets.
But oil and gas were only part of the story. While the Caspian’s resources were undoubtedly viewed by Washington as a major prize to be secured, Azerbaijan’s geographic proximity to the center of the administration’s broader attempt at conquest of the Middle East was also incredibly valuable. With open talk of the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran and several reports detailing military planning for such operations as part of the “war on terror,” many of Tehran’s neighbors, particularly those directly on its border such as Azerbaijan, were very resistant to the overt presence of U.S. forces on their soil. Iran had made clear that it would retaliate against any state that supported the United States in an attack. As the Caspian Guard program got under way in 2004, “the Azerbaijani parliament adopted a law prohibiting the stationing of foreign troops on the country’s territory, a move widely believed to be a gesture towards Moscow and Tehran, which both oppose any strengthening of military ties between Azerbaijan and the US,” reported the EurasiaNet news service.
16
But despite the overtures to Washington’s foes, the reality was that Azerbaijan was on the receiving end of a massive new pipeline of U.S. military assistance.
Enter Blackwater
In early 2004, with the United States ratcheting up its rhetoric against “axis of evil” member Iran, Blackwater USA was hired by the Pentagon under Caspian Guard to deploy in Azerbaijan, where Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite Azeri force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region. The $2.5 million Army contract for a one-year project indicated that it was open for competition but that Blackwater was the only company to bid on it.
17
On Pentagon documents, the nature of Blackwater’s work in Azerbaijan was kept vague—only mentioning “training aids” and “armament training devices.” Despite the secrecy, one thing was clear: Blackwater had once again found itself at the forefront of a pet Bush administration project. “We’ve been asked to help create, for lack of a more educated term, a SEAL team for Azerbaijan, both to help them with their oil interests in the Caspian but also to kind of monitor what goes on in the Caspian during the wee hours of the night,” said Blackwater’s Taylor. “These are very, very politically . . . sensitive issues.”
18
Blackwater joined a U.S. corporate landscape in Baku that included other Bush administration-linked corporations such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Unocal, and ExxonMobil.
Some analysts viewed Caspian Guard and the Blackwater contract as a backdoor U.S. military deployment. “We were hired to come in and build by the U.S. government, to build a maritime special operations capability in Azerbaijan,” said Blackwater founder Erik Prince at a U.S. military conference in 2006. “We took over an old Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) base and built about a ninety-man Azeri high-end unit.”
19
Prince called Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work “a great small footprint way to do it.” Instead of sending in battalions of active U.S. military to Azerbaijan, the Pentagon deployed “civilian contractors” from Blackwater and other firms to set up an operation that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base for an attack against Iran. “Compared with the U.S. efforts to train and equip troops in neighboring Georgia, training Azerbaijan’s commandos was a relatively low-profile program,” observed Central Asia correspondent Nathan Hodge. “It’s understandable: The country is sandwiched between Russia and Iran, and sending a contingent of uniformed U.S. military trainers would be a provocative move. A private contractor helps keep things under the radar.”
20
One indication of the strategic importance of Azerbaijan comes from the list of names associated with the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1995 to “facilitate and encourage trade and investment in Azerbaijan” and to “serve as a liaison between foreign companies and Azerbaijani businesses and officials.”
21
Its “Council of Advisors” reads like a who’s who of the hawks of the Reagan-Bush era: James Baker III, Henry Kissinger, John Sununu, and Brent Scowcroft.
22
The board of directors includes senior executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and Coca-Cola, while the trustees include Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, and top neoconservative Richard Perle. Listed as “former” officials of the organization are none other than Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage.
23
“These men are the power behind the throne in Azerbaijan,” observed investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, adding that Blackwater’s deployment would be “impossible to imagine . . . without a nod from one of these principals.”
24
A March 2004 Blackwater recruitment ad sought a manager to oversee the contract “to train, equip, and permanently establish a Naval Special Operations Unit in the Azerbaijan Armed Forces.”
25
The announced salary was $130,000 to $150,000 annually. Blackwater referred to the project as part of a “Maritime Commando Enhancement” program. “The Caspian Sea is a region of interest for many, many reasons,” said Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor at a conference on contracting in 2005, where he held up Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work as evidence of successful U.S. government contracting to help allied governments build up their forces. “This is not a zero-sum game. We’re not trying to take as much of the pie and leave the government with nothing so we can get as much money as we possibly can. It just doesn’t work out that way. And if you want quote unquote repeat business, if you want to have a solid reputation, it’s actually affecting the strategic balance in an area for the government or assisting in doing that, then you’ve got to be part of that give and take. And we like to think that we do that on a daily basis.”
26
Caspian Guard appeared to be part of a strategy Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had articulated publicly in a visit to the region in early 2004. At a press conference in Uzbekistan on February 24 of that year, Rumsfeld revealed that he and other senior U.S. officials had been discussing the establishment of “operating sites” in the area, which he described as facilities “that would not be permanent as a base would be permanent but would be a place where the United States and coalition countries could periodically and intermittently have access and support. . . . What’s important to us is to be arranged in a way and in places that are hospitable, where we have the flexibility of using those facilities.”
27
In Georgia, where the Pentagon has also deployed private military contractors, a Western diplomat told the
Guardian
that the United States was considering “creating a ‘forward operational area’ where equipment and fuel could be stored, similar to support structures in the Gulf.”
28
“The two moves would combine to give Washington a ‘virtual base’—stored equipment and a loyal Georgian military—without the diplomatic inconvenience of setting up a permanent base,” according to the paper.
29
That appeared to be the strategy with Blackwater in Azerbaijan as well. In strategically important Baku, Blackwater renovated a Soviet-era maritime special operations training facility that Pentagon planners envisioned as a command center modeled on those used by the Department of Homeland Security.
30
As part of Caspian Guard, the United States also contracted defense giant and Iraq War contractor Washington Group International to construct a radar surveillance facility in Astara, just north of the Iranian border, one of two such facilities built under the program.
31
The other was positioned atop a mountain south of Russia’s North Caucasus region, not far from Chechnya.
32
Washington also renovated the nearby Nakhchewan airport to accommodate military aircraft, including from NATO.
33
In the meantime, encouraged by its cozy relationship with Washington, Azerbaijan dramatically increased its military spending by 70 percent in 2005 to $300 million.
34
By the end of 2006, it had reached a whopping $700 million, with the country’s president pledging it would soon grow to $1 billion annually.
35
In the event of a U.S. war against Iran, Azerbaijan would play a central role; to Tehran, the U.S.-orchestrated buildup along the Caspian was an ominous threat. Iran actually responded to word of Blackwater’s involvement in the region by announcing the creation of its own special naval police force that would patrol the Caspian.
36
As an exclamation point to Iran’s concerns, Ariel Cohen of the right-wing Heritage Foundation wrote in the
Washington Times
in 2005 that Caspian Guard was “significant . . . for any future conflict with Iran.”
37
As
Jane’s Defence Weekly
reported, the U.S. presence near the Caspian allowed Washington to “gain a foothold in a region that is rich in oil and natural gas, and which also borders Iran. ‘It’s good old US interests, it’s rather selfish,’ said US Army Colonel Mike Anderson, chief of the Europe Plans and Policies Division at US European Command (EUCOM). ‘Certainly we’ve chosen to help two littoral states, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, but always underlying that is our own self interest.’”
38